I dream of Uktena (Reply)

I don't know what is chewing on Silvertip's mind, but something is and the damn Uktena isn't about to flat-out tell me what is wrong. Whatever it is, it is getting worse, not better. I was tempted to poke at the Uktena's dreams before and after Slug mentioned Nightmares... Well, if I can find the root of Silvertip's problems, maybe I can help her. Sunday night, I went too bed late, made myself comfortable, then mimicked the affects of Dreamspeak and sent my mind out in search of Little-Silvertip's dreams.

Well, fuck me, that was not what I was expecting to run in to when I found Silvertip's dreams. Those were mages, or at the very least, one of them was. Twisted, horrible, backwards Warpers. What they did was horrible. The ritual they were preforming was horribly perverse. And, the dream was far to precise, specific, detailed, to be a nightmare of something heard, read about, or seen. No. I know memories and these were memories. But, if they belonged to Silvertip, she would have been dead long ago. It was strange, the way she learned about Mages so fast. Little details that took me /years/ to pick up on. Gaia. She clearly bit off more than she could chew and this was her punishment. What dark holes have you been looking in to, Little-Silvertip-Mauls-the-Horned-Serpent, in your search of knowledge? Not that I was any better. I took down every detail. Every scrap of information that I could. Those Mages... Those Nephandus... They were doing more than defiling a Caern. They utterly destroyed it. I needed to know what they did, so I can figure out how to stop them, if they ever come here. But watching them. Trying to memorize what they were doing. It was hard. So very hard.

Once Silvertip was 'dead' in the dream, her corpse was tossed in to a pile with uncountable others. She healed, went lupus and fled the area. I created the dream image of a Uktena in lupus, pacing alongside the Ahourn. I called Silvertip names, goaded her in to confronting her fears. The two Nephrandus that had defiled her so horribly. It worked. She went back. She faught. I nudged the dream to make certain she would win and when I left, she was winning. Handily. Hopefully, now that she has defeated her nightmare, she'll start to get better now. And, if I'm lucky, she'll never know I went poking at her dreams.

Oh, man, I did not feel well after waking up and promptly emptying out the contents of my stomach. I couldn't get my hands to stop shaking. Tea. Tea was good. It helped. I'd managed to hold it together, long enough to pretend to be a wolf and force Silvertip to confront her fears, but now that I was out of the dream... After my hands stopped shaking, I called up my mom. I felt bad about waking her up, but this was something that I had to tell her about. Silvertip had clearly gone poking at something that'd fed her information about Mages, but she'd ended up with more than she'd bargained for. Bad. Bad news. Asked my mom to ask around. See if anyone had ever heard of anything that could do that to an experienced Garou. She told me to be careful. I promised to check in regularly for the next little while.

After the call with my mom, I pulled out my art supplies and tried to make notes on what I'd seen. Every single time I tried to draw the ritual, even at its most basic line and shapes form, I just couldn't get it right. I'd get to a step I remembered, but it wouldn't fit with what I'd managed to put down already. Did that horrible event come before this terrible event? I felt as if I could to remember it clearly, but the paper refused to hold what I saw. Every time I tried to correct my notes, it seemed to get worse--more tangled, more complex, more uncertain. Wasn't this the what happened? The more I tried to write it down, the worse I felt. It started with a headache. A certain itching behind the eyes, a bizarre need to sneeze without ever managing it. Then came the phantom aches, half remembered snatches of Things in the background which I could never see clearly, and I was never certain they were actually there. Half an hour in, I think I heard a voice in the room with me. Whispering. I gave up at that point and pushed the notes aside. I was tired. Tired to the point where I was seeing and hearing things. And, clearly, I wasn't getting anywhere. I packaged up my notes, set them aside.

I tried sleeping. Couldn't sleep. So, I got back up and dug out a bottle of vodka. Four shots and a half-hour later, I managed to find oblivion.